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Traditional Folksong in Northern Ireland and Canada with Marge Steiner

Please join us on Friday, April 4th, as the Archives of Traditional Music presents a performance on traditional folksong from Northern Ireland and Canada by Bloomington’s own, folklorist Marge Steiner. Marge’s lifelong passion for traditional song was sparked at a very young age through broadcasts on educational radio stations in New York. Having discovered the work of the Lomaxes at age 14, she read Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, and knew that she had found her calling as a folklorist.

Her doctoral thesis, completed at Indiana University in 1988, was a study of singers and songs of Newtownbutler, a border village in Northern Ireland, in which she wrote about how Catholics and Protestants used singing as a means of conflict management. During her fieldwork, she recorded traditional repertoires for over a ten-years-long period. Her later research focuses on folksong from the Miramichi region of New Brunswick, Canada. Some 400 hours of her field recordings are housed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

In this concert, Marge will please the audience with special selections from the folk repertoires that she studies and has come to perform so well. This way, she seeks to pay homage to the singers who so generously shared their lives and songs with her. She wants her passion for these traditions to be infectious and hopes that others will recognize the intrinsic worth of the songs, learn them, and pass them on.